Scientists have stumbled across a huge group of previously unknown Adélie penguins on the most northerly point of the Antarctic Peninsula.

　　科學家們在南極半島最北端無意中發現了一大群以前不為人知的阿德利企鵝。

　　Numbering more than 1.5 million birds, they were first noticed when great patches of their poo, or guano, showed up in pictures taken from space.

　　這超過150萬只的企鵝種群首次被注意到，是因為它們的大便出現在從太空拍攝到的照片中。

　　The animals are crammed on to a rocky archipelago called the Danger Islands.

　　這些動物擠在一個叫險惡群島的巖石群島上。

　　The researchers, who detail the discovery in the journal Scientific Reports, say it is a total surprise.

　　研究人員在《科學報道》雜志上詳細介紹了這一發現，他說這是一個驚喜。

　　"It’s a classic case of finding something where no-one really looked! The Danger Islands are hard to reach, so people didn’t really try that hard," team-member Dr Tom Hart from Oxford University, UK, told BBC News.

　　英國牛津大學的團隊成員Tom Hart博士告訴BBC：“這是一個經典的找到沒有人真正注意過的東西的案例!險惡群島很難到達，所以人們并沒有真正嘗試這么做。”

　　The scientists used an algorithm to search images from the American Landsat spacecraft for sites of possible penguin activity.

　　科學家們使用一種算法從美國大地衛星航天器搜索可能存在企鵝活動的地點的圖像。

　　Landsat does not return especially high-resolution pictures and so when the system flagged potential colonies, they had to be followed up with much sharper pictures for confirmation.

　　大地衛星不會返回特別高分辨率的圖片，因此當系統標記潛在的群落時，他們必須跟蹤更加清晰的圖片以進行確認。